The Prodigal
by Fluffy-CSI
Summary: Just when things are getting interesting between Tony and Ziva, someone from the past breaks back into his life. Tiva. Incidental S7 spoilers, nothing major.
1. A night at home

Tony let his head loll back on his shoulders tiredly for a second, then reached for the power button on his monitor. "That's it. I am _out _of here." He reached over to the printer, picked up the paperwork it had just spit out, and headed for Ziva's desk. "Hey, Desk Duty Girl, you can check my work."

She accepted the sheaf of papers with only a mild roll of her eyes. She was usually irritable about her restriction, but Tony would not be Tony if he didn't prod her about it. Besides, at the moment she was less concerned with his teasing and more concerned with his departure. "It is only six-fifteen," she commented glancing at her watch. "You are making an early night of it. Do you have somewhere you must be?"

"Nah." He reached for the lightweight jacket he'd worn into the office that morning. "I just want to get out of here before Gibbs comes back and finds something to head-slap me about. How about you? Gonna spend the night unpacking, or do you have a hot date?"

A hot date, hah. Ziva had been too concerned with recovering her normalcy to worry about socializing, and she didn't foresee returning to casual dating any time soon; she was still too prone to flinching at inopportune moments. For now, she was content with interacting with only the people she knew she was safe around.

But Tony didn't know that, and she didn't plan to tell him. For his benefit, she shrugged carelessly. "As you can see, I am in no hurry. However, if you do not have plans, I have a..." She paused, searching for the word. "...a 'proposition' for you."

"Oh, _really_." He grinned. "Wait 'til I tell McGee that you propositioned me right here in the office."

Ziva took in the smug look on his face, mentally rewound through her words, and decided that clearly _proposition _had not been the correct word after all. "I did not mean it in whatever way you seem to think. I was simply going to suggest dinner."

"Oh?" In spite of himself, he looked interested.

"Yes." It was silly that she felt so nervous about this. She knew that Tony disliked cooking for himself; an invitation to dinner was not likely to be declined. Even if she did have an ulterior motive, he didn't know that. Not that she necessarily had an ulterior motive at all; she wasn't entirely sure what had caused her sudden desire to invite him. Perhaps there was a motive she wasn't conscious off, and perhaps there wasn't. She would explore that thought later, after -

"Ziva?"

She blinked, realizing that while she had been debating with herself, he had been watching her skeptically. Now she straightened her back, lifted her chin, and pressed on: "I owe you a dinner from long ago, in exchange for the dinner party I did not invite you to."

"Wow, that's a blast from the past. Thought you'd forgotten about that. No one ever mentioned it again."

"I do not forget. So?" She stood up and turned off the monitor on her desk. "Are you interested? I will cook."

"An evening with a pretty girl who's going to cook for me?" He threw his jacket over his shoulders and gave her his most charming, boyish smile. "Damn right I'm interested."

"Come on, then." In spite of the fact that she knew just how much research he had put into perfecting that smile, she still struggled to not be affected by it.

"Uh, Ziva?"

"Yes?" she asked as they headed for the elevator.

"How exactly are you going to cook for me? Do you even have, you know, _pots _yet?"

She smiled. "I bought some yesterday."

* * *

Hours later, she laughed and poured more wine into their glasses, nudging their dirty dinner plates aside to put the wine bottle back on her coffee table. "I am surprised."

He took a sip of the red and raised his eyebrows. "At what?"

Ziva cocked her head to the side, studying him. "At you. We are here, in my apartment. We have eaten and drunk. I let you force me to watch a movie featuring dwarves and flying monkeys."

"They're _munchkins_, not dwarves, and what's so surprising about any of what we've been doing?"

"Munchkins, Tony, are donuts. You made me eat them once. These," she emphasized, pointing at the screen, where Judy Garland stood surrounded by little people, "are dwarves." She toasted him teasingly and took a large sip of her wine. "And the surprising part is that I have not wanted to kill you even once tonight. You are being...less obnoxious than usual."

To her surprise, he had no quick rejoinder. He took a thoughtful sip of wine and smiled slightly. "Would you believe me if I told you I've been practicing?"

Ziva snorted. "I have seen you interact with McGee. If you were practicing being less obnoxious, you hid it well."

"Not with him." He shrugged. "Just with you."

She opened her mouth to reply, could think of nothing to say, and reached for the wine bottle to cover her consternation. The last of the wine went into their glasses, and Ziva held the bottle up. "We have finished almost two liters of pinot noir."

He blinked, not having expected that conversational about-face. "Did we? What's a liter in _real_ measurements?" Her easy use of the metric system had always garnered teasing annoyance from him.

She let out a surprised giggle, then cut off the sound in horror. "I am sorry. I did not mean to -"

"Laugh?" He gave her the most serious look he could muster with a liter of wine swimming through his bloodstream. "You should do it more often. You don't smile enough anymore, either."

"I..." She swallowed. "I am trying, Tony."

"I know." He stretched an arm across the back of the couch, brushing his hand across the far side of her shoulder. "C'mon, pay attention to the movie. I can't _believe _you've never seen _The Wizard of Oz _before."

"I will get another bottle of wine," she said, standing up.

Tony glanced at his hand where she had been a second ago, then looked up at her, silently questioning her movement.

"And _then _we will watch the rest of the film." She dredged up another smile for him. "I promise."

* * *

"Christ, how much did we drink?" Tony groaned, rubbing his eyes as they stepped into the elevator the next morning.

Ziva smirked at him. "I believe there is still a bit of wine left in the second bottle. You do not hold your liquor as well as you had led me to believe, Tony. I am disappointed."

"Yeah, well, sorry. How about next time, we drink martinis, and we'll see who does better with _those_."

She crossed her arms and faced him, eyes direct. "Will there be a next time?"

He met her gaze and nodded as the elevator doors opened in front of them. "Yeah. I think there probably will."

They stepped out of the elevator, still focused on each other. In fact, Tony was so busy watching Ziva sit down that he almost walked into the person standing next to his desk. He pulled up an inch short, raised his head to look at the visitor, and froze.

"Hi, Tony," Jeanne Benoit said quietly.


	2. Surprise visitor

"Jeanne," he managed, dragging his eyes away from hers. What would a normal person, someone who was just pleasantly surprised to see her, say next? He considered and discarded a series of responses in the few seconds of silence before finally settling on, "How are you?"

"I'm...ok." She nervously clasped her hands together and began twisting them as she looked around the room. "This place looks different. Have you..." She winced at the banality of what she had been about to say. "I'm sorry. That sounded stupid. I just..."

"Couldn't think of anything else to say?" he finished for her. "I know the feeling."

They stood facing each other in silence for another few seconds.

"I'm back in D.C.," Jeanne finally offered weakly. "Moved last week."

"That's good." He could feel Ziva's gaze burning into his back, and he had to fight not to turn to see the look on her face. Ziva had never approved of Jeanne, especially after things had come to a head and Jeanne had turned her back on him. He could pretty well guess what sort of look she was giving the other woman now.

Well, he couldn't stand here all day staring at Jeanne, that much was obvious. If Ziva didn't break it up, Gibbs or McGee would. He steeled himself, drew in a breath, and said, "Why are you here, Jeanne?"

She closed her eyes for a second and her hands resumed the twisting motion, which looked distinctly painful to Tony.

When Jeanne's eyes opened again, they were looking directly into his. "For you. I'm here...for you."

Tony stared at her.

She freed her hands and started to reach out to him, then checked herself. "Please. Just...come have coffee with me. Talk with me. That's all I want."

"I don't like coffee," he blurted before he could stop himself, dizzied by the surreality of the situation. A scene like this belonged in a movie, not his life.

"But you always....oh," she said as she realized that that, too, had apparently been part of his facade. Tony waited for the inevitable hardening of her face, but it never came. Instead, she smiled tremulously and said, "Tea? Hot chocolate? What does the _real_ you drink?"

It was an obvious olive branch, and he couldn't not take it. "Coffee's fine," he told her with a nod. "Let's go."

It wasn't until he turned to follow Jeanne to the elevator that he remembered the woman who sat across from him, and he glanced over his shoulder at Ziva. "I'll be right back."

Before he could turn back to keep walking after Jeanne, who was already halfway to the elevator, Ziva was away from her desk and grabbing his arm to hold him back. "Tony, you cannot do this. I cannot cover for you when Gibbs asks where you are."

He shook free of her hand and gave her his most reassuring smile. "I'm not asking you to. I'm just going to get some coffee with her, figure out what the hell is going on. I'll be back before anyone notices."

"Tony."

Her tone of voice stopped him as her hand not been able to. "What, Ziva?"

She swallowed. "Do not let her do this to you again."

"I'm not letting her do anything." He raised his hands, warding her off. "And I'll be fine." When Ziva made no more moves to stop him, he offered her another smile and headed for the elevator. Halfway there, he paused and turned around again. Ziva stood where he had left her, still watching him. "Hey, it's just a fact-finding mission," he called to her, and disappeared around the corner.

Ziva closed her eyes for a second, drew in a slow breath, and returned to her desk.


	3. Covering up

**A/N:** I apologize for the crazy short chapters in this story, but my stories have a way of setting their own chapter-ending punchlines. And when one comes along, I have to go with it...

* * *

She found herself sneaking glances toward the elevator every few seconds, even after other people began to trickle in. McGee caught her once and gave her a curious look, but when he opened his mouth to ask her what she was looking at, she gave him a glare fierce enough to force his mouth closed. He looked wounded, but at least he didn't ask anything further.

She opened a file on her computer and began reading, or at least pretending to. The gunshot residue on the dead Marine's head was- _Where was he?_ It had been at least an hour since he walked out with that woman. She would not cover for him when someone asked. She simply wouldn't. He should not have gone anywhere with Jeanne during working hours.

And possibly not during non-working hours, either.

She ground her teeth and attempted to refocus on the autopsy report on her screen.

"Ziva!" McGee hissed from across the aisle.

She looked up and gave him another of her best dangerous looks.

Avoiding her eyes, he nevertheless stood up and crossed over to her desk. "Where's the hell's Tony?"

"I do not know."

He planted his hands on her desk and leaned down over her monitor. "Yes, you do."

That was an unusual tone for him. Intrigued in spite of herself, she raised her head and met his eyes. "No, I do not. And why are you asking _me_ this?"

"Would you rather have Gibbs ask you? Because even if you scare me back to my desk, _he's _not going to take no for an answer, and he just stepped out of the elevator _so if you know something you'd better tell me now before he kills both of us_." His entire sentence came out in one breath, and the last few words came out on an insistent wheeze as he stared over her shoulder at their approaching boss.

Ziva swallowed. "I truly do not know where he is." Had there been a slight, unintentional emphasis when she said _where_? She was very much afraid there had been.

McGee appeared to have had the same impression because his eyes narrowed and he looked closely at her, opening his mouth to say -

"Where the _hell _is DiNozzo?" Gibbs spoke up from over his shoulder.

McGee stifled a squeak and whirled around. "DiNozzo? He's not here? Uh..." He snuck a pleading look back at Ziva.

"He is..." _Tell him, Ziva. You warned Tony that you wouldn't cover for him. You do not owe him any protection. Tell him where he is, and Gibbs will have him back here so fast that that he will not know what happened_. "He is..."

Gibbs pinned her with the penetrating stare she knew so well from watching his interrogations. "_Yes_, Ziva? 'He is' where?"

"He is..." she began again, and made her decision. "He is at home, changing. He upended an entire cup of coffee over his pants shortly after he arrived here, and he felt that he had enough time to rush home to change before everyone else arrived."

"And it took you three tries to get that out?" he asked suspiciously, not giving an inch in their face-to-face confrontation.

"I apologize. He did not wish me to tell you, because he believed you would make fun of him. Something about Kate laughing at him from heaven about karma?" She mentally thanked the wine they had drunk last night for getting that story out of him so she could use it.

Gibbs continued to eye her for a few seconds, then nodded, apparently having accepted her story. "And he's right," he said with a smirk. "Kate would have laughed her ass off. " The smirk turned into a grin and he dropped into his desk chair, chuckling. "Especially since this time she can't have secretly loosened the lid on him."


	4. So sew me

DiNozzo reappeared twenty minutes later, obviously aware that he was well-past the point of being back quickly enough not to be noticed. Ziva watched, waiting for him to meet her eyes, as he slunk out of the elevator and toward his desk, but he didn't look up.

"Geez," McGee took the opportunity to comment loudly as the other man attempted to make a quiet descent into his desk chair, "what'd you have to do, iron them first?"

Tony stiffened in surprise at being called out, opened his mouth to generate an excuse, and only belatedly realized that he had no idea what McGee was calling him out about. "What?"

"Your pants," McGee replied, rolling his eyes at the evasion. "Give it up, Tony. Ziva told us the whole thing."

His eyes widened. "She did?"

"Yeah, DiNozzo, she did," Gibbs said, coming up behind him.

Tony froze for a second, then quickly finished sitting down and began an attempt at damage control: "I don't know what she told you, but I was just -"

"Clumsy?" Gibbs supplied.

"No, I was going to say - wait, what?" He stole a glance at Ziva, who was still watching him with interest. "What...exactly...did Ziva tell you?"

McGee snickered, obviously relishing the opportunity to be on the winning end of the joke for once. "That you dumped your coffee all over yourself and tried to get home and back to change before anyone found out."

"I...she..." He ignored McGee's continued mocking and locked his eyes on Ziva's. "So," he managed to say slowly to McGee without looking away from Ziva, "she told you all about it, huh?"

"Yep!"

"Then I guess...I'm caught." He raised, then dropped his hands in a gesture of defeat. "Mock away, Probie."

He recovered quickly, she would give him that. It was actually rather impressive. As he continued to stare at her, obviously overflowing with questions he could not ask, she directed a bright smile in his direction, then returned her attention to her computer.

* * *

Two hours later, Ziva and Tony stepped into the elevator, glaring at each other. He had been short with her ever since his late arrival, and she was fed up with it. She had protected him; what did he have to be angry about?

She was just opening her mouth to tell him that when she realized they were not alone in the elevator. Two analysts were already inside, one leaning against each wall and both watching them avidly. She pasted on a smile for them, stepped to the back, and resolutely turned to face the doors. Beside her, Tony did the same.

They rode in silence for a few seconds.

She watched him out of the corner of her eye.

He pretended he didn't notice.

She made it more obvious.

He glanced at her, scowled, and looked forward again.

She had him, she knew. She waited.

Finally, the pressure had built up too much for him to contain and he whipped back around to face her. "What did you _tell_ them?" he mouthed furiously.

She eyed the analysts, mentally calculating the likelihood that they would decipher her words if she spoke in a whisper, and then decided that she didn't much care, anyway. "A _story_, Tony," she hissed back. "What did you want me to tell them? The truth?"

"_No_."

"Then _what_?"

"I just -" He stopped, sighed, and ran a hand through his already-mussed hair. She wondered how it had gotten that way; it had been perfectly combed when he had left with Jeanne that morning. "You said you weren't going to cover for me," he finally said.

She sniffed. "I lied. So sew me."

It took him a second to mentally translate that from Ziva into English. " 'Sue,' Ziva. It's 'so _sue _me,' not 'so _sew _me'."

"Whichever."

One of the analysts made the mistake of choosing that moment to sneak a look behind her, and was treated to a glare from Ziva that had felled lesser women. The woman quickly turned back around and slapped at a random elevator button. The doors popped open and, not stopping to decide whether this was the floor they had been headed for, the woman grabbed her friend's arm and dragged her out of the elevator toward MTAC.

In their distraction, they had gotten into an elevator going up instead of down, Tony and Ziva realized at the same time, but neither was going to admit it out loud. By silent agreement, they waited quietly, looking straight ahead, for the doors to close again and then resumed their argument:

"Why the hell would you make up a _story_, for god's sake?" he blurted at the same time she said, "I do not understand why you are angry that I did you a _favor_!"

They paused, each waiting for the other to continue, then started up again in perfect sync:

"I didn't ask you to do me any favors!"

"Because I did not want to embarrass you by telling them that you were led out of the building by your -"

"Ziva!" he roared, cutting her off.

Surprised by the volume he had generated, she stopped.

"I was not led out of the building by anything, _thank you very much_."

She lowered her lashes suggestively and smiled. "If you say so."

"Ok, you know what?" He threw up his hands. "Fine. Think what you want. The fact that I went to have coffee with Jeanne is -"

The elevator doors slid open just as he said the word "Jeanne," leaving them face-to-face with Gibbs, who had been waiting for them on the ground floor . He raised his eyebrows at them and repeated the name in a tone that demanded explanation.

"Er..." Tony scrambled for an explanation that would sound plausible. "I was just saying that..."

"...that," Ziva picked up quickly for him, "Jean Claude van Damme was his favorite action hero. And I was about to disagree vehemently on the grounds that any man who wears a horsetail -"

"Ponytail, Ziva," Tony corrected automatically.

"- cannot be an action hero," she finished, enjoying the look of grateful surprise he was trying, again, to hide.

"I don't care if he wears _pigtails_, DiNozzo," Gibbs replied. "Get your butts in the car."

They did.


	5. You are shouting now!

She sighed, pulled out the pins that had been holding her hair into a tucked-under french braid, and dropped the handful of metal into a desk drawer. Even her hair felt full of grime at this point, and as she untangled the braid with one hand, she felt the crunch of dried blood on her fingers. It had been a long day with entirely too much blood in it, and she wanted to scrub her hands and body and get its residue off of her.

She snuck a look around the room. If she could get out of NCIS without catching too many people's attention, she'd be able to go home and shower sooner rather than later, and with a minimum of dirty looks from one or more of her teammates.

"Hey, Ziva." She turned around to find McGee approaching from behind her, looking mildly concerned. "You ok?"

"I am fine. Why do you ask?"

He shrugged. "You've been jumpy today. You were looking around just now like you're on the lookout for someone. Anything going on?"

He did not suspect. He was simply being a concerned co-worker. She gave him a tight smile and shook her hair out. "No, nothing. I would just like to wash some of the blood off of my clothing."

Not looking convinced, he nodded. "Ah."

"And my hands."

McGee said nothing.

"And from my hair." She pulled a handful of hair over her shoulder and looked down at it. "I believe there is some splatter in it. It irks me to have blood in my hair."

He chuckled. "Me too, and you've got way more than I do." He glanced over his shoulder, making sure the coast was clear, then leaned closer. "If you want to go home, I won't tell. It's past quitting time anyway, and we can stick DiNozzo with the paperwork for a change."

"Why, McGee, how rebellious of you." She considered her chances for a second, then smiled and patted him on the shoulder. "I like it. And I will take you up on it. Shall we make a run for it before he arrives to stop us?"

McGee grabbed his coat and grinned. "Deal."

They were almost to the elevator and Ziva was focused on untangling a particularly nasty snarl left over from her braid when a pair of Italian loafers appeared in her line of sight. She danced to the side, barely missing their owner. "Do you mind?" she snapped at DiNozzo, trying to go around him.

He made a movement that started as an "after you" wave and somehow ended up with him holding onto her arm. "I'll take it from here, Probie," he informed McGee, who had stopped short next to Ziva. "Go finish the paperwork."

McGee's mouth worked indignantly, but his retort was cut off by the appearance of Gibbs, who scowled at the trio. "Hey! Someone going to write up this report, or not?" the older man demanded, brandishing a sheaf of papers. "Because I'm damn well not doing it when I have two probies on my team."

"DiNozzo -" McGee began, only to be preempted by Tony's louder voice: "McGee volunteered, Boss. He wants to get some more experience, you know?"

"That true, McGee?"

Neatly backed into a corner, McGee said the only thing that wouldn't make him look like a slacker in front of Gibbs. "Sure, Boss. On it." He accepted the paperwork, directed a vituperative look at DiNozzo and a sympathetic one at Ziva, and headed back to his desk.

"You know he's not going to let you get away with that much longer, right?" Gibbs asked DiNozzo conversationally.

"Yeah, Boss. Taking advantage of it while still I can."

"Riiight." Gibbs shook his head in amusement and resumed his route toward the center of the squad room.

"You may let go of me now," Ziva said, trying to shake off DiNozzo's hand, which was still wrapped around her arm.

"Oh, no. I'm not letting go of you until I get an explanation about today. Don't do it," he added quickly when saw a look he knew all too well cross her face. "You hit me right now and we're both going down _right here_ to finish this."

Ziva glared. "There is nothing to finish. Release me."

"Not gonna happen."

She sighed. "All I want to do right now is take a shower, Tony, and I cannot do that with you attached to my arm. I cannot even get _home _with you attached to my arm. We would not fit through the Metro faregate together."

Sensing victory, he used his free hand to teasingly dangle his car keys over her head. "I'll drive."

* * *

"This is not the way to my building, Tony," Ziva pointed out. "Considering that you were just there last night, I am surprised that you do not remember."

"I know where your apartment is, Ziva. I never said that's where we're going, however."

She sat up straight in the passenger seat and regarded him suspiciously. "Oh? Where are we going, then?"

"My place."

"Why?"

He didn't answer immediately, and Ziva reached over the center console and pinched the underside of his arm through his shirt.

"Ow! What the hell?"

"You will tell me why you are taking me somewhere that I did not ask to go," she instructed, twisting the bit of skin she still held. "Now."

"Fine, fine. Just let go." He made a halfhearted swipe at her hand with his free arm, but had to return it to the steering wheel too quickly for it to be effective. "Christ, that hurts!"

"It is supposed to." Reluctantly, she released him. "It is an especially sensitive area. Very useful for...coercion. Now, explain yourself."

He sighed. "I need to talk to you."

"Oh?" She raised her eyebrows. "With, or without unreasonable amounts of shouting?"

"I did not shout at you!"

"Yes, you did!"

"Did not!"

"You are shouting now," she pointed out, her voice rising. "You shouted at me in the elevator. I _do not like_ being shouted at!"

"Well I'm _sorry_!" he yelled back without thinking, then looked embarrassed. "Look," he managed in a more moderate voice, "I just want to talk to you. No yelling. Just talking."

"Why would you need to talk to me? Should you not be off with _her _tonight?"

"No." He swung the car onto a side street, neatly slipped it into a parallel parking spot she would not have believed it could fit into, and shifted the transmission into park. "Now, are you going to let me talk to you, or do I need to leave you alone on a dark street corner in a strange part of the city?"

Ziva rolled her eyes. "We are less than one block from your apartment, Tony. This is not a strange part of the city. Except in that_ you_ live here."

"Har, har." He faked a smile, then quickly wiped it off his face. "Get out."

"Oh, fine." They both climbed out onto the sidewalk. "We will talk. But I will not be held responsible for any damage to your property that results."

He rubbed his arm where it was still sore from her pinch. "Deal. I'll even make you something to eat."

"You do not cook, Tony."

"True. Let's say...I'll even order you your own pizza."

"I will not have to share with you and fight you for the last slice?"

"Nope."

She smiled. "The evening is looking up."


	6. Pizza

"Order the pizzas," Ziva said, following Tony into his apartment and shrugging off her jacket. "And do not touch mine while I am in the shower."

He stopped with one arm in his coat and one out and stared at her. "What?"

"I am serious, Tony. If you touch my pizza, I will break your fingers."

"That's not what I was 'what'ing. I was 'what'ing the concept of you taking a shower. Where, exactly, will you be taking this shower?"

"In your bathroom." She bent down to untie one sneaker, then the other, and kicked them off. "Is this a foreign concept to you? You are many things, but I did not think 'unclean' was one of them."

"I am perfectly clean, thank you. I am just _very confused_ as to why you plan on climbing into my shower, in particular, now, in particular."

"Oh. Did I not tell you? I have blood in my hair. I do not like it. I want it gone."

That made a surprising amount of sense to Tony. He'd seen her near-covered in blood and not flinching, but the covering had never included her hair. In fact, this aversion explained a lot, and -

"Tony." She waved a hand in front of his face. "May I use your shower, or not?"

"Yeah, sure. Just let me, uh -" he began, trying to head her off as she turned to walk deeper into the apartment. "I haven't had a lot of time to clean lately -"

"It is fine," she interrupted, reaching for the hem of her shirt and heading toward what she assumed was his bathroom. "I have showered in places that are far worse than this."

"I -" he tried again, making his best effort to not watch her hands. Before he could get out anything else, she had disappeared into the bathroom. "What do you want on your pizza?" he called weakly after her.

Her head popped back out past the doorframe. "Just cheese. And..." She held her shirt out to him. "Find me something to replace this. It is blood-stained."

Before he could come up with a reply to that, she was back in the bathroom with the door closed.

Tony took a step into the hallway, tweezed up her shirt with two fingers, and retreated to the kitchen.

* * *

Ziva joined him in the kitchen twenty minutes later, wearing the oversized Ohio State shirt he had left outside the bathroom door for her. "You could not have brought me pants?" she asked, scowling.

"You didn't ask for pants," he pointed out defensively through a mouthful of pizza.

"I suppose I should consider myself lucky that you had both shampoo _and_ soap in your shower." She leaned past him to open the second pizza box and pulled out a slice. "You did not touch my pizza. I am impressed."

Tony swallowed, eying where the t-shirt ended high on her thighs. "You, uh, want me to get you some pants now?"

"It can wait until after I've eaten." She took a large bite of the slice. "You will behave yourself until then, I presume?"

"What, me?" He gave her his most angelic look. "When have I ever misbehaved?"

"I have allotted you thirty seconds in which to stare at me before I retaliate, Tony. You have already used up nineteen-point-five of them. I recommend you conserve the rest."

Eyes wide, he shoved three-quarters of a slice into his mouth at once and stepped back. Then, changing his mind, he leaned forward again. " 'Retaliate', like how?" he asked in fascination.

His words were muffled by the pizza, but the look on his face told her exactly what he'd said. She smiled and mirrored his posture. "Would you like to find out?"

Tony's mouth dropped open, displaying half-chewed pizza in a most unattractive manner, as he stared at her.

There was silence for a long moment, and then Ziva drew back. "Do not even think about it," she managed unconvincingly. "I was, of course, making a joke."

He closed his mouth and finished chewing. "Of course."

More silence. Ziva picked up her pizza box, turned away, and carried it to the other side of the kitchen. "So," she said quietly into the box as she reopened it, "you said that you needed to talk to me."

"Um, yeah." He reached for another slice, then reconsidered and closed the box. "About today."

Crossing her arms, she turned to face him and leaned back against the counter. "Yes?"

"You said you weren't going to cover for me."

"Yes."

"So...why did you?"

She pursed her lips thoughtfully and shrugged. "I do not know, exactly. Perhaps I wanted to protect you."

"Protect me? From what?"

"From yourself. From Gibbs." She shrugged helplessly. "I do not know! It was an impulsive decision."

He considered that for a moment. "Ok, 'from Gibbs' is a definite possibility, but you and I both know I don't need to be protected from myself. I," he went on, chuckling smugly, "know _exactly_ what I'm doing. At all times."

"Oh?" She cocked her head to the side. "And what, 'exactly,' were you doing with that woman this morning?"

"Talking."

"For over an hour?" she retorted incredulously.

"Yes!"

"Very well. If you were simply 'talking,' then you will not mind telling me what you were talking about."

To her surprise, he blushed. "Nothing I'm gonna tell you about."

"Has she moved back to the area?" she shot back.

"Yes."

"Does she require assistance with something related to criminal activity by or against a Marine or member of the United States Navy?"

"No." He narrowed his eyes. "I'm not going to discuss this with you, Ziva."

"You do not need to." She smirked. "I am perfectly able to draw the indicated conclusion: if she does not require your professional...expertise...then she came looking for you for personal reasons." Scoffing when he opened his mouth to defend himself, she turned back to her pizza box. "For a time, I almost believed that you were too intelligent to drop for that, but I see that I was wrong."

"Hey!" Tony barked, for once too busy with other considerations to correct her misused idiom. "Just because a woman comes to see me doesn't mean I'm dying to get in her pants."

Ziva directed an incredulous look at him over her shoulder.

"...Usually," he qualified reluctantly.

"You have already been in this particular woman's pants," she pointed out.

"Doesn't mean I want back in."

Bending forward to rest her elbows on the counter, she ran annoyed hands through her wet hair. "So I am to believe that you are, what, simply secretly meeting with an old friend?"

"What do you care, anyway?" Taking advantage of her turned back, he eyed her legs. Nice legs. Much more attractive unclothed than covered in pants, and that was saying something considering how she looked in pants.

"I do not care. I am simply concerned for you." She frowned. "So you are saying that you are _not _interested in this woman?"

"I..." Discomfited, he rubbed the back of his head. "I don't know."

"You don't _know_? This is something you should know, Tony!" she said emphatically, beginning to pace the kitchen. "You need to know things like whether you are interested in your old girlfriend who has come back after deserting you! You cannot just...go through life _not knowing_!"

"I didn't say I was going to go through life not knowing! I just said I don't know right now."

"Unacceptable."

"It's not up to you to accept it!"

Ziva pulled to a sudden stop mid-pace, inches away from him. "Isn't it?" she asked quietly before resuming her pacing.

"I -" His mouth worked for a second before he came up with more words to fill it. "Don't start this now, Ziva."

"Then when?" she demanded, throwing up her hands as she turned on her heel to face him again. "The next time one of us is almost killed? The next time one of your girlfriends appears in the middle of my squad room?"

"Oh, now it's _your _squad room?" he shot back, closing the gap between them.

"It is more mine than hers!"

One moment they were facing off, nose-to-nose, in the center of his kitchen; the next, the edge of the kitchen counter was cutting into her back as his mouth slammed down on hers. Her arms twined around his neck; his hands slipped down to cup her behind as he smoothly lifted her to sit on the counter.

Tony's doorbell rang.


	7. The doorbell rings

Ziva's eyes popped open at the sound, then fluttered closed again. "Do not answer it," she muttered thickly into his mouth, tightening the hand she had in his hair and dragging the other down his evening-roughened cheek.

"I should..." he attempted half-heartedly, but the words disappeared somewhere in the air between them.

She hooked one ankle around his the back of his thigh, locking him in his current position, and pulled her hand away from his face long enough to drag one of his to the hem of her t-shirt. "They will go away."

His tongue flicked over her lips, and she felt rather than saw him smile against her mouth. "They'd better." His fingers curled slowly into the edge of the t-shirt, inching it up her back as he gathered it into his fist.

Ziva moaned and arched into him.

A fist rapped against the apartment door.

They both froze in disbelief, hoping there wasn't a second knock. When there was no more sound after a few seconds, he slid his hands under the t-shirt and spread them across her back, pulling her against him.

The knock came again, this time louder and more insistent. "They're not going to go away," he gasped, reluctantly lowering his hands. "I'll just go..."

"Tony." Her hand fisted in his hair.

He nearly sobbed with the effort it took to pull away from her. "Just...wait there. I'll get rid of them," he told her reassuringly, then nearly gave in again when his eyes landed on her swollen lips. "No." He visibly shook himself. "I'll get rid of them." It was a promise to himself and to her, and before she could reach out to draw him back in, he was on his way to the door.

"I don't know what you're selling," he called to the intruder through the door as he worked the two locks on it and turned the knob, "but I am _not _in the mood to buy any of -" His voice dropped like a stone at the sight of the face in front of him, and he blinked. "McGee?"

It came out on startled squeak, and McGee eyed him curiously. "Hey, Tony. Sorry for stopping by without calling," he said as he took a step into the apartment past a too-shocked-to-resist DiNozzo, "but I was in the neighborhood and I wanted to talk to you about -"

He stopped short, staring into the kitchen with eyes that nearly bugged out of his head. "-Ziva?" he finished incredulously.

Ziva, caught out in the open, slithered off the counter and faced him with what dignity she could muster. "Hello, McGee."

"I was just..." McGee tried again, but got caught up in staring from one embarrassed coworker to the other.

"Speak, McGee!" Tony barked in exasperation. Whatever the other man had been about to say, it couldn't be any worse than what he'd already seen.

"Uh," McGee stammered, trying to get his feet back under him, "I wanted to talk to you about, uh, Ziva -" He stole an embarrassed glance at her - "and I was in the neighborhood, so I came by, but then outside your building I ran into, uh..."

He stopped again and looked over his shoulder at the still-open apartment door where, for the first time, the room's occupants noticed McGee's companion: a pale and wide-eyed Jeanne. "I didn't think you'd mind, so I told your doorman she was with me. Which," he added hastily, backing toward the door, "was clearly not a wise choice on my part, so I'll just be going now and leave you - all - to it. Whatever 'it' is. Not that that's any of my business."

"I should go, too," Jeanne hastened to throw in as McGee almost backed into her in his haste. "This is...obviously a bad time...I should have, um, called..."

"No!" Tony automatically held out a hand to stop her, then remembered the woman standing behind him and winced. He looked over his shoulder at Ziva. "I mean -"

Ziva, cheeks bright red now, raised her eyebrows challengingly at him. "Yes, Tony? What did you 'mean'?"

"I..."

McGee, not taking his eyes off the volatile situation unfolding deeper inside the apartment, continued backing through the door, taking Jeanne with him. "Sorry, Miss Benoit," he muttered out of the side of his mouth, "but you're obviously right that this is a bad, time, and..."

"No, no." She went willingly with him, pulling the door closed after them as they cleared the doorway. "It was my fault. I should have expected...never mind. It's not your fault."

Something shattered against the inside of the apartment door.

McGee and Jeanne both flinched. "Uh..." McGee managed weakly, "can I give you a ride home?"


	8. Cut off

Tony barely ducked in time to avoid the coffee mug Ziva had launched at his head. The woman had deadly aim, and the mug smashed into the door behind him exactly where his forehead would have been. "Hey!" he snapped, looking down at the ceramic remains. "Abby made that for me!"

"And I have un-made it for you!"

After a moment of silence for the mug, he took a step back toward the kitchen, then caught sight of the look on her face. It had passed _mutinous _and was rapidly moving on to _deadly_, and his sense of self-preservation stopped him in his tracks. "Oh, come on, Ziva, you can't say that was my fault!" he complained, waving a hand at the door. "I had no idea either of them was going to show up!"

She gave him an incredulous look. "You believe that is the problem here?" When he didn't reply, she laughed ironically and shook herself, forcing her tightened muscles to relax. "You are consistent, I will give you that."

"What does that mean?"

"It means..." Turning her back on him, she headed into the bathroom to retrieve the rest of her clothes. "...that nothing is ever your fault!" she called back over her shoulder as she stepped into her pants, which were stiff with half-dried blood spatter. Her voice echoed hollowly in the tile bathroom. "Even when it _is _your fault," she finished quietly, returning to the living room.

Still having no idea what he had done wrong, he turned his hands up in helpless confusion. "How is this my fault? I didn't ask her to come here! Or him, either! McGee has never once, in seven years, showed up at my apartment without extenuating circumstances, Ziva! How was I supposed to know he would tonight?"

"The fact that they showed up here is not the problem!" She paused, reconsidering that. "Well, it is _a _problem. But it is not _the _problem. Give me my jacket," she added, unwilling to lean around him to retrieve it from the chair she had dropped it on not so long ago.

He picked it up, but didn't hand it over. "Tell me what _the_ problem is, then," he wheedled, dangling the jacket like a lure.

She whipped it out of his hand before he could react, leaving him shaking his fingers in pain after they got caught for a second in the fabric. "I should not have to," she snapped. "You are a federal agent. You are not even particularly bad at it. You should not be this dense!" Tony opened his mouth, but she waved away whatever he was going to say. "However, since it seems that you _are_," she continued, donning the lightweight coat, "I will explain the situation to you. Perhaps you can use it for future reference."

"With...you?" he ventured cautiously.

"No."

Tony blinked. "Ok so then...with Jeanne?" he attempted again, fumbling for whatever her comment had been intended to communicate.

"No." She smiled tightly and slipped on her shoes. "After what she has seen tonight, I suspect she will not be...what is the phrase? 'Pounding down your door'?"

" 'Beating'," he supplied in spite of himself. "So what, now I don't get you _and _I don't get her?"

"Exactly. You could not decide whether you wanted me or her." She smiled again and reached for the door. "And now, you get neither."

Before Tony could process that, the door was closing behind her.


	9. The next morning

After a morning of oppressive silence and wary looks the next day, Ziva had had enough. When she saw McGee go into the men's room at lunchtime, she gave him two minutes, then followed him in and locked the door behind her.

McGee was standing at the sink, vigorously washing his hands, and didn't seem to notice the movement in the mirror as she closed and locked the door.

"I need to speak to you," Ziva said finally, startling him.

He whipped around to confront the threat of whatever had snuck into the room behind him, and the momentum of the turn propelled a jet of soapy water from his hands to the front of Ziva's shirt. "Oh, crap. I'm sorry, Ziva, let me -" he began, then belatedly noticed where they were. "What are you doing in the men's room?" he asked, his tone changing from apologetic to suspicious.

"As I said, I need to speak to you."

McGee swallowed and turned back to the sink to finish rinsing the soap off his hands. "About...?"

"About last night." She pulled a paper towel out of the dispenser and handed it to him.

He accepted the towel and dried his hands, setting about the action with a level of concentration she doubted he had ever used before, perhaps not even at crime scenes.

"They are dry, McGee!" she finally exclaimed impatiently, yanking the towel out of his hands and throwing it away. "I will not forget that I need to speak with you just because you spend a few minutes drying yourself."

"Look, Ziva," he set in determinedly, turning back to face her and taking the bull by the metaphorical horns. He knew she could only have hunted him down for one reason. "It's none of my business what you and...anyone...are doing in your spare time, ok? I shouldn't have barged into his apartment, and it's my own fault that I got myself into -" He broke off and flinched away as Ziva raised a hand.

Surprised, she looked from him to her hand and back. "I am not going to strike you, McGee," she explained soothingly, lowering her hand. "I just wanted you to stop speaking."

"Oh. Um...ok," he muttered, embarrassed, and closed his mouth.

"Thank you." Crossing her arms, she turned to lean her back against the counter, placing herself next to him instead of in front of him. "I am not angry with you. In fact, I wished to apologize to you."

"You...what?"

"It was unwise of us to engage in what we were doing out in the open. Not to mention," she added, waving an expansive hand as he opened his mouth, "that it was unwise to engage in...that...at all. It is not the fault of anyone who happened to walk in that they saw what they did."

McGee, taking it in, raised his eyebrows and waited for her to continue what was obviously a rehearsed speech.

"What you observed last night," she went on, "was...an error. It has not happened before and it will not happen again."

"Ok..." he ventured, unsure why she was telling him this.

"I do not wish you to be uncomfortable," she explained, replying to the confusion on his face. "It is not something I want to have you wondering about. I also do not wish for you to feel that you are being forced to keep a confidence."

"I'm not?"

"There is no confidence to keep, McGee!" she exclaimed, rounding on him unexpectedly. "That is what I am telling you!"

He blinked. "So the whole thing where you were sitting half-naked on his kitchen counter..?"

"It was a mistake!" she snapped. "What more do you want me to say?"

McGee straightened up and looked down at her. Now that he was reassured that she hadn't come into the bathroom to ensure his permanent silence, he could see that she wasn't enjoying this confrontation any more than he was. Ziva was as shaken up as he'd ever seen her.

He wondered what, exactly, had gone on between her and Tony after the door closed behind him and Jeanne. Whatever it was, it couldn't have been good. "It was a mistake," he said, repeating her words. "So you came in here to tell me...not to feel bad, because I didn't see anything worth worrying about?"

"Yes!" She smiled, relieved. "That is it exactly! And..." She paused, pursing her lips. "To request that you not speak of what you saw to anyone. I understand that this is perhaps an unreasonable request," she added quickly, before he could speak, "but I would consider it a -"

"Hey, hey." He held up a hand to stop her. "I was serious when I said it wasn't any of my business, ok? You're a grown-up. I have no reason to go blabbing about anything I see you doing. As long as -" He winced, not wanting to say the words that had just occurred to him. "I mean, I assume it was consensual and everything, right?"

Ziva flushed and pulled back an inch. "Of course," she managed, eyes on his shoes.

"Right. Then it's not my business," he said in his most brisk, businesslike tone, attempting to soothe her embarrassment. "And I won't be knocking on people's doors without calling first from now on, either." He offered her a tentative smile. "I promise."

Ziva sighed and returned his smile, although her eyes hovered somewhere in the vicinity of his chest instead of his face. "Thank you."

"No problem. Now..." He sidestepped her to point to the door. "Can I unlock that?"

"Oh!" Ziva, regaining her composure, chuckled and crossed the room to unlock the door. "Of course. I had forgotten I locked it." She pulled it open an inch, then paused and turned back to him. "Thank you," she said again, with more feeling. "I..." She shook her head, deciding that was enough, and disappeared through the door.

* * *

**A/N: You may have noticed that I'm not updating as frequently as I had been. I'm in the middle of NaNoWriMo, so a lot of my writing time is going to that project. I'm also going to be away the week of Nov 15-22. But I'm going to try to keep my fanfics going as much as possible otherwise!**


	10. Dragging McGee into it

**A/N: Yes, this story's still kicking! Just, um, weakly. And slowly.**

* * *

Tony saw Ziva appear in the doorway of the men's room, look over her shoulder and say something to someone inside, and then stroll toward the elevator. Seconds later, a worried-looking McGee followed her out.

Tony froze. Ziva used the men's room as her own personal conference room, he knew - so what kind of conference had she been holding with McGee in there? There was only one topic hot enough for her to have called an emergency meeting like that, and it definitely _wasn't _the fact that they hadn't pulled a case yet and it was past noon.

He had to know. "Probie!" he called as McGee appeared back around the edge of his cubicle. "Get your butt over here!"

Eyebrows raised and giving the other man a skeptical look, McGee nevertheless obeyed the summons and approached Tony's desk. "Yes, Tony?" he asked with a long-suffering sigh.

Tony took a microsecond to calculate what strategy would best drag the story out of him with a minimum of push-back. "Carrying on personal meetings in the bathroom?" he asked, snapping his head around to stare at the younger man. "Keeping secrets from your team members? Tsk, tsk, Probie! I'm going to need a sitrep."

McGee's eyebrows dropped for a moment as he opened his mouth and prepared to defend himself, then went back up as he parsed Tony's words. "You want a sitrep," he repeated carefully. "Of what secrets _I _am keeping from the team?"

"Well -"

"Because I'm thinking you may want to rethink that presentation, you know?" McGee went on with straight face. "If you want me to share _everything _about my team members..."

"Ok, ok, I get it." Tony threw up his hands in surrender. "I approve of your keeping _certain_ secrets. But I'm still gonna have to demand an explanation of what I just saw, Mc-Men's Room."

McGee thought about that. DiNozzo wasn't doing a very good job of hiding his anxiety to hear whatever it was Ziva had told him, and, finding himself unexpectedly on the right side of the balance of power, McGee decided to see what, exactly, it was that Tony was hoping she hadn't said. "Let's go get coffee," he suggested coolly.

Tony blinked. "Ok..."

"And you're buying."

Tony directed a dirty look McGee's way, but didn't protest.

Yeah, McGee decided, there was something Tony very, very much wanted to know.

* * *

"_There_," Tony snapped twenty minutes later. "You've got your half-caf hazelnut mocha with room, and I'm ten bucks poorer. Now sit down and tell me what the hell she said to you."

McGee took a sip of his drink. "Maybe you should try asking herwhat she had to say."

"I'm asking _you_, Probie. And you're going to tell me. Now."

"Am I?"

Tony's hand clenched for a second around his coffee cup, denting the cardboard, before he forced himself to relax. "Yes," he said smoothly, "you are."

McGee sighed. "What, exactly, are you afraid she said to me, Tony? I mean, what could she possibly say that would cause you any more trouble than what already happened last night?"

"I'm sorry?" Tony used his free hand to gesture to his ear as if he hadn't heard. "Did you just say that something happened last night? Because I'm pretty sure _nothing happened_. And if you know what's good for you, you'll think that too."

Rolling his eyes, McGee took a sip of coffee. "Her technique is way better."

"Technique at what?!"

"Negotiating my silence."

Tony's eyes narrowed. "Is that what she wanted?"

"Among other things." Another sip of coffee. He was actually rather enjoying having Tony at his mercy. If he hadn't already known exactly what Gibbs thought of his agents trying to blackmail their partners, he might be tempted to give it a try. "She wanted to tell me that what I saw was all there was," he allowed, deciding to throw the man a bone. "And _request _that I not talk about it to anyone."

"Request..." Tony mused. "I can do th- Wait, _what's_ all _what_ was?" That had caught him by surprise. He lowered the coffee cup he had been about drink from and pinned McGee with a glare that demanded answers.

McGee shrugged. "You'd know better than me, Tony. I'm keeping myself out of this. Seriously," he added when the other man opened his mouth. "It's between you and Ziva. I'm respecting her request that I not say anything to anyone, and I'd really prefer if the two of you would just leave me out of it."

"What _it_?" Tony demanded, his voice creeping up half an octave. "That's what I want to know!"

McGee let out an incredulous laugh as the pieces clicked together in his head. Ziva embarrassed. Tony desperate for information. Jeanne standing behind him in the apartment doorway. "She blew you off!"

"What? No!"

He was sure now. "She _did_! Tony, I know Ziva. There's no way she didn't shut you down after she saw Jeanne last night. Hah!" He couldn't resist a bit of crowing. God knew he didn't get to do it very often.

"Maybe you just don't know Ziva as well as you thought you d-" He broke off at the sound of his phone ringing inside his jacket. "Hold that thought, Probie."

McGee shrugged and turned his attention to his coffee.

"DiNozzo." Silence. "Hello? This is Tony DiNozzo."

"Um...hi," said a familiar female voice.

"Jeanne?" Luckily for him, his surprise made the name come out on an almost inaudible breath that McGee didn't seem to be able to decipher.

Another moment of silence, and then, "Yeah."

"...Hi," Tony managed warily, returning his voice volume to normal and trying to keep his tone neutral so McGee didn't pick up on who he was speaking to.

"You're mad at me," she said quickly, reading to much into his noncommittal tone of voice. "I'm sorry about last night, Tony. I didn't know you had...you were..." She stopped, collected herself for a moment, and tried again: "I didn't know. But," she hastened to add, "I'm glad you've got someone. Really!"

"It's not - I don't -" he attempted, then paused to try to gather his wits before trying again: "It was a big misunderstanding all around, J-"

McGee's head snapped around as he realized whose name contained that sound.

"Look, hold on." He covered the mouthpiece of the phone and glared at McGee. "Shoo."

The younger man blinked. "What?"

"Shoo! I'm on the phone. You have your coffee, go enjoy it somewhere else!"

Rolling his eyes, McGee took a large swig of coffee and stood up. "Just another thing I haven't seen or heard, right?"

"Exactly."

"Sure." Giving him one more knowing look, McGee strolled away, making a show of savoring his drink.

Tony watched him go, and only when he was out of earshot did he uncover the mouthpiece of the phone. "Sorry, Jeanne. Look, the whole thing last night, that was a misunderstanding."

Jeanne laughed, and if he hadn't once known her every sound so well, he wouldn't have been able to detect the forced quality beneath its lightness. "It's ok, Tony. Really!"

"No, look, it's just -" He cut himself off there. Obviously she wasn't going to believe his protests unless he went into more detail, and he didn't want to do that on the phone. He would try another tack in the meantime. "Listen, are you busy?"

"Now?"

"Y - I mean no, of course not." He'd almost forgotten that they were smack in the middle of the work day. Jenny Shepherd was no longer around to smooth the way for a mid-day rendezvous between him and Jeanne, and besides, he had a probie on his tail. "I was thinking maybe after work. A drink?"

"That could be do-able," she hedged with what he thought was a slightly flirtatious edge to her voice. He could almost see her smiling through the phone. "My shift ends at seven. Um, I'm at George Washington now," she added quickly. "Not Monroe. They, um, filled my job when I left, and they just couldn't fit me back in."

"Ok." Tony thought for a second. "Meet you at McFaddens? Say, seven-thirty?"

"Sure. That's fine."

"Good. I'll - what, McGee?" he demanded when the younger man swam back into his field of vision.

McGee scowled. "Schedule your dates some other time, Tony. Gibbs just called wanting to know where the hell we were. We've got to get back."

If Gibbs had called, that meant he had missed their presence. Which meant either he needed them for something, or they were in trouble. "Gotta go," he blurted into the phone, and flipped it closed halfway through Jeanne's confused protest. He chugged the rest of his coffee, tossed the cup into a nearby trash can, and jumped to his feet. "Let's go, McSlow!"


	11. It's not a date

At precisely seven o'clock that evening, Tony stood up from his desk, reached for the suit jacket draped over his chair, and leaned down to shut off his computer. When he straightened up again, he almost slammed the top of his head into the chin of the woman standing over him. Ziva had approached swiftly and quietly, and it was only her quick reflexes that saved them from collision.

"What the -?" he gasped, jumping back and bumping into the desk chair, which rolled away from him until it banged into the file cabinet behind him. His jacket slithered to the floor, landing with a loud plop that bespoke something heavy in its pocket. The series of exclamations, clangs, and plops got the attention of everyone nearby, and Tony felt himself flush. "What, Ziva?" he demanded, embarrassed.

Her lips tightened at the sudden attack. "I would like to speak to you."

"Love to," he said breezily before he had time to consider the significance of that request on this day in particular, "but I've got a d-"

Silence.

Ziva swallowed. Her eyes darkened. "I see.

"Well, I mean, not literally," Tony backpedaled hastily. "I mean, it's just something I have to go do, I only meant 'date' figuratively, and -"

"It is fine," she interrupted, although the chill in her voice was obvious. "It..." She took a breath and let it out. "It was not important, anyway."

"No, Ziva -"

"Go!" she broke in again, offering him a bright smile. "Truly. I would not want to make you late."

Tony looked at her for a second, then nodded. "Yeah. Wouldn't want to be late. I'll, uh...see you later."

"Of course."

Ziva watched him go, waiting for him to look back over his shoulder as he reached the elevator, but he didn't. When he was out of sight, she sighed, took a fortifying breath, and turned back to her desk.

...And proceeded to run nose-first into McGee's chest. He peeled her off him, dusted her off solicitously, and offered a smile. "Hey! You ok?"

She glanced over her shoulder almost reflexively, expecting to see Tony laughing at her, but there was only his empty chair. Swallowing, she turned back to McGee and smiled back. "Of course. I apologize for running into you."

"S'ok. You were distracted."

"Yes, I was - what?" she broke off, stiffening.

"Distracted," he provided. "Watching Tony." When Ziva opened her mouth to protest, he held up a hand to stop her. "I said I wouldn't tell people about it, not that I'd go functionally blind. So...you ok?"

Blinking a few times, she steeled herself. "As I said, of course."

"Right." He crossed his arms and looked down his nose at her with an expression that, until recently, would have set her laughing at his attempt at domination.

She tried now to dredge up some of that amusement. "Come on, McGee. Of course I am ok! What else would I be?"

"Disappointed?" he suggested. "Hurt? Confused?"

She looked around uncomfortably, noting that the room had been slowly emptying out around them. Gibbs was nowhere to be found. Tony was long gone. She was, essentially, alone with McGee, who knew entirely too much about her situation for either of them to be comfortable. "Very well," she allowed finally. "I am slightly disappointed, yes."

McGee continued to look at her.

She sighed. "And confused."

"I won't make you admit to the last one." He patted her shoulder, then slung a friendly arm around her. "Look, let's go get some dinner or something."

"No, I -"

"Hey, come on." With a judicious application of arm pressure, he began to steer her toward the elevator. "You look like you want to vent - _talk_, I mean _talk_," he corrected himself before she could. "And," he added with a sage look, "I'm the only one who's already been read in."

Ziva groaned, ran a hand through her hair, and allowed herself to be led out of the room.

* * *

"So," Tony said as he and Jeanne settled down at a tall table inside McFadden's, "how was Gabon?" He twisted around to tuck his jacket between him and the back of the chair, careful to not leave any pockets exposed to passersby.

"Hot." Jeanne smiled and took a sip of her beer. "But fulfilling. I needed to...get my head out of the space it was in, and Gabon did the job. If there's anything Médecins Sans Frontières can do for a person, it's to show them that their worries are small in the grand scheme of things." She ran a hand through her hair, longer now than it had been before she had gone to Africa, and sighed. "Some of those kids, Tony, they were..." She shook her head and sighed. "I'm not the same after all that."

"Funny, you still look like Jeanne," he joked. "Well, except the hair." He reached across the small table and touched a finger to where it fell on her arms. "You grew it o-" He'd overstepped his bounds, he realized immediately when she slowly looked down at where he'd touched her. Quickly, he withdrew his hand. "Sorry."

She blinked and looked back up at him. "No, it's ok. I'm sorry, it's just..." She shrugged awkwardly. "It seemed so natural, they way you just did that. But I'm not used to it anymore."

"I know. I'm sorry, I didn't think about it. Won't happen again," he assured her, mentally kicking himself.

"Tony." She laid a hand on his arm, surprising him. "It's ok, really. I didn't say I didn't like it. Just that I...wasn't used to it." After a moment, she smiled tentatively. "But I could get used to it."

It was Tony's turn to blink. "You could?" he asked, taking a drink of his beer to cover his surprise.

"Well, I mean..." Jeanne winced, obviously embarrassed by what she had blurted out. "I mean, I could, but I understand that it's not something that's on the table, and I really am happy for you about your -"

Tony lowered his bottle back to the table with a little too much force. The loud clink of glass on wood startled both of them and cut Jeanne off mid-sentence. "Yeah, about that," Tony finally said, looking down at the table. "There is no 'my'. I know," he added holding up a hand to stop her protests, "what you saw. That was a just a...a thing. A one-time thing. She's, uh, not interested."

Jeanne's eyebrows crept up a fraction of an inch. "She looked pretty interested to me."

"I have a smashed coffee mug that says otherwise. Trust me, Jeanne, she's not interested."

"And what about you?" She turned her beer bottle around in her hands and picked at the label nervously. "Are you interested?"

"I..." he began, then sighed. "...don't know."

Jeanne nodded understandingly and took another drink, waiting for him to go on.

"Look, Jeanne," Tony tried again, "It doesn't matter if I am, because she's not. And I don't want to talk about her, anyway. I mean..." He dredged up a winning smile. "I mean, I haven't seen you in two years! I want to hear about Africa. I want to hear about how you like George Washington's hospital. I want to hear -" Suddenly, Jeanne reached across the table and covered his hand with hers. Startled, Tony stopped. "What?"

"_I_ want to hear you tell me the truth." She smiled tentatively, as if offering a truce. "No covering up. No playing nice. No changing the subject."

Tony swallowed and eased his hand out from under hers. "Ok." He could handle that, right? He straightened his shoulders and tried to exude competence. "The truth about what?"

"You. Me." She looked down. "Us. You once told me that none of it was real. And I told you I wished I'd never met you. But I've had..." She inhaled deeply. "Time to think. Lots of time. About both of those things. And...I've reconsidered mine."

Tony took another sip of beer, polishing off the contents of his bottle, and waited for her to say something else. Seconds ticked by.

"So I," Jeanne finally continued, her volume dropping to almost nil, "was wondering if you'd reconsidered yours. At all." Doing her best not to meet his eyes, she began tearing small strips off the label of her beer bottle.

"I don't need any time to reconsider that," he replied quickly, glad that the question was one to which he already knew the answer. "It was never true, what I-" He stopped short there, forgetting what he had been about to say, as a couple entering the bar caught his eye. "What the...?"

Just inside the doorway of McFadden's stood McGee, with his arm comfortably around a brunette who could easily be -

"Ziva?"

The track on the bar's CD changer chose just that moment to change, and Tony's surprised exclamation rang out through the room.

Ziva's head snapped around. Their eyes met and locked for a moment, and then she deliberately looked away from him and back at her companion.

"Isn't that...?" Jeanne asked, drawing Tony's attention back to her.

"Yeah."


	12. Jeanne's intentions

"We...should go," McGee said, drawing out the first word warily as his eyes were drawn to where Ziva was looking. The last thing he wanted was to bring Tony and Ziva face-to-face tonight. He dropped his arm from around her shoulders and took hold of her arm instead, trying to herd her back toward the doorway, but she planted her feet and refused to be moved. "Ziva," he tried again, a warning in his voice.

"What?" As if someone had flipped a switch, the tension disappeared from her posture. She went from stiff and defensive to relaxed and confident, which as far as McGee was concerned, was just a bigger reason to worry.

Pretending she didn't notice his state of high alert, she turned her palms up, giving him her most innocent look, and strode deeper into the room. "I like the nachos here," she told him over he shoulder, sounding supremely unconcerned. "Why should we not stay?"

"Because you -" he began, scrambling after her, but broke off when her breezy expression turned into a hard warning. "...Right." Without another word, he trailed Ziva to a table that, thankfully, was situated across the room from Tony and Jeanne, with the wide bar separating the two.

"There," she smiled, dropping onto a chair. "This is not so bad, eh?"

McGee opened his mouth to reply, but was cut off by the prompt appearance of a waitress. She burbled a cheerful greeting, setting McGee's teeth on edge. This was not how he had intended to spend his night. Hell, he couldn't even focus on the otherwise-pretty girl waiting on him, because he was too busy preparing to tackle Ziva when she inevitably tried to take a knife to Tony after a few minutes of watching him romance Jeanne.

"We would like an order of the nachos supreme," Ziva told the waitress. "And I would like a mojito. McGee?" she prompted, looking to him with a polite lift of her eyebrows.

"I, uh," he stammered, "I'll take just water, thanks."

The waitress nodded and disappeared, and Ziva regarded him curiously. "You are not drinking?"

McGee shrugged. "Let's just say I don't think it's wise for _both _of us to be drinking tonight."

With a careless laugh, Ziva reached across the table and patted his arm. "Nothing is going to happen, McGee! My goodness, relax for once!"

"I'm relaxed!"

Ziva rolled her eyes, but didn't protest further. When the mojito arrived at the table, she took a large sip, settled back in her chair, and smiled.

* * *

"You said she wasn't interested," Jeanne said, watching Ziva gracefully take her place at a table. She crossed her arms, leaned back in her chair, and raised her eyebrows at Tony.

Deliberately not looking across the bar, he shrugged. "As far as I know, she isn't. It's probably just, you know, a coincidence."

"A coincidence?" She gave a short, disbelieving laugh. "So she comes here regularly, and just happens to have walked in today? With...your other coworker? What's his name, again?"

"McGee," he said through clenched teeth. And before he could catch himself, he stole a glance at the other side of the room. Ziva and McGee appeared to be in the midst of a comfortable conversation, and as he watched, a waitress dropped off two glasses for them. Ziva immediately snatched hers up and took a sip, while McGee moved more slowly, his eyes on her.

Jeanne laughed again, drawing his attention back to her.

The knowing look on her face was easy to read, and it set him on the defensive. "What?" he said, reaching for the new bottle of beer he'd received a minute ago.

"Tony."

"What?" he said again, drawing the vowel out into something perilously close to a whine.

"Tony." She covered his hand with hers and patiently started prying his fingers from around the bottle. "This is _me_, remember?"

"So?"

"So..." She got his last finger uncurled and forced his hand flat on the table. "Don't lie to me. That's the only thing I'm asking from you tonight, remember? Don't lie to me."

He curled up the hand she had pushed to the table and reached for his beer with the other, which had escaped her attention. "I'm not lying to you." He took a long sip of beer, avoiding her eyes. "Why would I lie to you? I don't lie to women!"

Jeanne raised her eyebrows and waited for the absurdity of what he'd just said to penetrate his brain.

Finally, it did: he'd lied to her for a living, for the better part of a year. "Wha - no, that doesn't count!" he protested. "That was just -"

"Just _work_?" she finished for him. "It wasn't 'just work' for me, Tony. It was my life. And you and your director meddled with it. I'm asking you not to do it again." When he opened his mouth, she held up a hand to cut him off. "That's _all_ I'm asking, ok? If you've moved on, if you're not interested in seeing me again - those are fine. But _do not _lieto me again."

The quiet desperation in her voice finally worked its way through his distraction. Tony paused, mouth open, and then unfisted his hand. He flattened it out on the table, inched it toward her, and then pulled it back again, thinking better of it. "What do you want from me, Jeanne?"

"I want you to tell me about that woman. About you. About what's going on in your _head_, Tony. Whatever it is."

Tony met her eyes for a moment, but couldn't keep his gaze on her too-direct one. "Her name's Ziva."

"Yeah, you mentioned that much." Beginning to relax now that he was showing signs of opening up, Jeanne took a sip of her beer for the first time since McGee and Ziva had walked in. "Tell me more."

Tony looked down at where his hand had tightened around the beer bottle. "She's from Israel. You met her, Jeanne. Before you left for Africa."

"I met a lot of people then. I've done my best to forget most of them." Her lips tightened. "It's not a time I like to remember."

"Oh." Why hadn't he realized that she would associate meeting his team with the death of her father? "Right," he managed, and took another long drink, polishing off his bottle to cover the embarrassment. "Sorry."

"It's ok. I'm..." She swallowed. "I'm ok with it. Mostly." Crossing her arms, she leaned back in her chair. "I don't want to talk about my father. Back on the subject, please."

Unable to stifle a smile at her bossy, doctor-in-charge tone, he did as ordered: "Her names's Ziva. She's Israeli - or, well, she was. I guess you could say she defected. She's working on American citizenship now."

Jeanne's eyebrows twitched. "'Defected'? I didn't know Israel was part of the Communist bloc."

Shrugging, Tony lifted his bottle back to his lips. "Israel, no. Mossad, however, has the same kind of passion for keeping its people as the communists did."

"She was a _spy_?"

He grinned. "More or less."

She stared across the bar at the other woman, trying to see James Bond in the slight form. "Wow."

Turning his free hand up to indicate that he had felt similarly taken aback at the discovery, Tony nodded.

Jeanne let out a breath and shook her head. "Are _any_ of you what you seem?"

"McGee is. You see a computer nerd who's still a virgin, you get a computer nerd who's still a virgin."

"Aw," she chided, rolling her eyes at him, "he seems like a nice guy."

"Yeah." Tony widened his eyes knowingly. "Exactly."

Cocking her head to the side, she studied him. "What about you, Tony? Are you a nice guy?"

"Depends who you ask," he answered smoothly.

Jeanne thought for a second. "What if I asked Ziva?" she asked finally.

Tony laughed ironically. "Ziva doesn't believe in nice guys."

"What _does _she believe in?"

"Justice." He took a sip of beer and slid the now-empty bottle to the edge of the table. "Security. Kicking ass."

"Yours?"

"Sometimes. You, uh, want another drink?" he asked, catching the waitress's eye.

She considered for a long moment, then seemed to reach a decision. Settling back in her chair, she nodded. "Yeah. Another drink would be good."

* * *

"I mean, look at him!" Ziva waved her hand in the general direction of Tony and Jeanne, almost knocked over her empty glass, and barely caught it with her other hand as McGee made an abortive lunge for it. "He is happily chatting up a woman who left him. _Left _him, McGee. Without giving him a chance to explain anything!"

"I know, Ziva," McGee replied tiredly, having already heard this ground covered twice since they had sat down. He looked over his shoulder for the waitress, intending to try to telepathically communicate a _no more for her _message, but the girl was nowhere to be found. With a sigh, he turned back to Ziva, who didn't seem to have registered his lack of attention.

"Certainly she is not bad _looking_," she plowed on, "but I do not understand what he could see in a woman who has so little faith in him. She would not even speak to him after it happened!"

"Whereas you -" McGee managed to snag her glass, pulling it out of the way of her hand as she began gesturing again. "- pulled a gun on him when you thought he'd screwed you over."

Ziva's eyes returned to him and glowed as she decided that he was suddenly understanding her point. "Exactly!"

McGee blinked. " 'Exactly' what?"

"That is the way to do things! You do not _flee _someone who has offended you - you _confront _them!"

"With a loaded weapon?"

"Well," Ziva said, frowning slightly as she thought about their confrontation in Israel, "I perhaps should not have taken the safety off, but...yes. It was much more straightforward and honest." She paused. "I believe I would like another drink." And before McGee could react, she had raised her hand to signal the suddenly-present waitress, who nodded her understanding without bothering to come to the table.

He watched with a sinking feeling as the bartender began muddling mint leaves for Ziva's third mojito.


	13. Tales from the men's room

Half an hour and another beer later, Tony excused himself to go to the bathroom, leaving a thoughtful Jeanne behind at their table. She had spent the last thirty minutes prying what she could out of him about his life since she left, and he needed a break to recover his wits before she made any more forays into his head.

The bathroom was a unisex single-toilet-and-sink job, and as he closed and locked the door behind him, an image of Ziva appearing beside him flashed through his brain. Chuckling at the absurdity of that - she wasn't speaking to him, let alone tracking him into bathrooms, after all - he unzipped his fly, leaned one forearm against the wall above the toilet, and closed his eyes in relief as the beers he had drunk flowed out of him.

"You are well-hydrated, I see."

Somehow still unsurprised, he didn't bother to lift his head off where he had been leaning it on his free arm. "Can I help you, Ziva?"

"No."

"Ok." He finished his business with a purposely-coarse grunt of relief, zipped his fly, and flushed the toilet. "Unisex bathrooms aren't generally intended to be used by both sexes at the same time, you know."

She shrugged and unbuttoned the waistband of her pants, sidestepping him as he moved toward the sink. "Why stay outside for modesty's sake? There is very little of me that you haven't already seen, Tony. And...what is the saying? 'When you have to go...'"

"What - aw, Ziva!" Hastily, he turned his back on her as she made it clear she was not going to wait for him to leave the room before using the toilet. "I locked the door for a reason."

"And I picked the lock for a reason. Ahh."

"You carried your picks to the _bar _with you?" he asked, doing his best not to look at her in the mirror as he carefully scrubbed each of his fingers, for lack of anything better to occupy himself with.

Ziva's pants rustled as she pulled them back up, but it wasn't until he heard the sound of her zipper and then a flush that he dared face her again. She was smirking at him. "I carry my picks everywhere. I never know when they might be needed."

"Like now?" he asked with a dubious look, moving aside as she reached for the sink taps.

Still smirking, she met his eyes in the mirror. "Exactly like now. So," she added, dropping her eyes to the sink as she started soaping her hands, "are you enjoying your date?"

"It's not a date, Ziva." He pulled a paper towel out of the dispenser, wiped his hands, and crumpled it into his fist.

"You are drinking in a bar with a woman for a reason other than work. This generally qualifies as a date in the United States, yes? Or have all those men been lying to me for the past four years?"

Scowling, he tossed his paper towel in the general direction of the already-overflowing trash can and yanked another one out of the dispenser as she reached to turn off the water. "I told you it wasn't a date, and it's not. It's a...meeting."

"With your ex-" She broke off there as his jaw tightened in warning. "...ex-whatever," she finished finally. "I do not care if it is a date," she went on with forced lightness. "Why should I? I simply find it interesting that you feel you need to lie to me about something such as -"

"Who's lying now, Ziva?" he asked softly, leaning forward as she reached for the towel he was holding.

She scoffed and pulled it out of his hand. "Certainly not me."

Sensing Ziva's retreat in their ongoing battle, he pushed his advantage. "Why are _you _here tonight? Hmm? You and McGee happened to want to go out alone, for the first time ever, and just happened to show up at the same place he knew I was coming?"

Obviously taken aback by his words, Ziva stiffened, clutching the paper towel in her one dry hand as the other one continued to drip on the tile floor. "He knew you would be here?"

Oh yeah, he was winning this skirmish. Tony chuckled smugly. "He'd have had to be a saint to not eavesdrop on my call to Jeanne. Yeah, he knew." Then something occurred to him, and he looked down at her, the smug smile melting off his face. "You didn't?"

"Certainly not!"

"Then..." Now he was confused. "How did he get you here?"

She snorted derisively. "He suggested we come out, away from _you_, and unwind." She snorted again. "Do I look 'unwound' to you, Tony?"

He considered her, from her mussed hair to the way she was standing with one hip popped aggressively out. "Nope."

Ziva sighed and shook her head. "I believe I shall go have another drink. _Elsewhere_," she added when he started to open his mouth. "I would not want you to think I was intruding on your _date_ any further."

"It's not a date! If you must know, all she's wanted to talk about all night is -"

"Hey!" an unfamiliar male voice called, accompanied by a fist pounding on the door from the outside. "Some of us gotta _go_, folks! Have your fight somewhere else!"

They froze, mouths open, and in unison turned to look at the door.

"_Now_!" the man hollered, and pounded again.

Ziva lunged for the door, snapped open the lock, and had slithered out of the room before Tony could even move to catch her. She gave the angry man in the hallway a wide smile, causing him to pause mid-knock to stare at her, and rounded the hallway corner a good five seconds ahead of Tony, who wasted precious time trying to ignore the other man's incredulous look.


	14. Saint Timothy

A hand slammed down on the table, shaking the glasses on it and startling McGee, who had just been beginning to let down his guard. "You knew!"

He looked up and found Ziva's eyes boring into his accusingly. She leaned closer, putting her face inches from his nose, and said it again: "You _knew _he would be here!"

"I...What? No," he sputtered automatically, realizing halfway through the denial that he didn't even know what she was accusing him of. "I didn't - uh, what was it that I knew?"

"So you admit it!"

"Huh?"

"Aha! You do not know what you _didn't _know. Which means you did know it!"

He inched his chair backwards, trying to get himself out of her striking distance. "Um, Ziva. I don't know what it is you think I knew, is all I was saying. I haven't left the table since you got up! How could I have found out anything?"

"You didn't need to do anything after I got up. You have already done quite enough!" Suddenly, Ziva pulled back and steepled her fingers together for a long moment, closing her eyes and doing what he could only assume was some sort of calming exercise. Then her eyes snapped open again and she closed the slight gap McGee had managed to open between them with a single step. Her voice suddenly silky, she smiled. "After all, you had done all the difficult work just by getting here, hm?" she asked, resting her fingertips behind his ear in what, if he hadn't known her well enough to fear for his life instead, might have almost seemed like a caress. "Now you can just sit back and enjoy the show. What fun, hm, McGee?"

He still wasn't sure what he was supposed to have done, but he knew enough to deny having any fun with it. He shook his head vehemently, dislodging her hand. "Uh-uh. Nope. No fun."

"No?" Her hand dropped to his shoulder and she leaned even closer. "Perhaps you were hoping for more drama than you have gotten? I'm sure it can't be very much fun setting me up when you then do not get to see the fireworks."

McGee swallowed and steeled himself before meeting her eyes and saying with what firmness he could muster, "Look, Ziva, I don't know what you think I did, but I can assure you that I have not 'set you up' in any way, and I'd appreciate it if -"

"_Liar_!" Her hand slammed against the back of his chair and McGee winced, envisioning it making contact with him instead.

"I'm not lying." He said it calmly now, reasonably sure that if she hadn't killed him when she thought he was a liar, she wouldn't once he started setting the record straight. "Ok? I wouldn't lie to you, Ziva. Not about something that obviously has you upset. So -"

"I am not upset!" she barked, interrupting him.

He nodded agreeably. "Of course not. You're clearly very calm about this," he managed to tell her without a trace of irony in his voice. "So sit down and - calmly - tell me what it is you're not upset about."

To his surprise, she obeyed, lowering herself into her own chair more than an arm's length away. "I must admit," she said after toying with her drink for a moment, "I am surprised. I would not have thought you could be so mean-spirited."

"I'm not mean-spirited. What's going on?"

She took a fortifying sip of her mojito and continued staring into the glass as she said, "You knew he would be here. You told me I should come with you so I could vent; you chose this place. And you knew _they_ would be here."

That was something to grab onto - something he was completely sure he was _not _guilty of. McGee shook his head and reached out to touch her hand, making her lift her head to meet his eyes. "I had no idea Tony would be here, Ziva. I've come to this place a bunch of times, and I've never seen him here. Why would you think I set you up?"

Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. "He carried on a phone conversation in front of you, in which he made this -" Almost involuntarily, she looked over her shoulder at where Tony and Jeanne were sitting. "-date." The word had a foul taste on her tongue, and she had to force herself to spit it out. "As Tony put it, you would have had to be a saint to not have listened."

It _would _have to be Tony who was getting him in trouble. "Oh, that's how he put it, is it?" Following her eyes, he glared at the other man's back, resolving to give Tony a piece of his mind when he got the chance. "Well, I guess I'm a saint. I didn't eavesdrop on whatever he said, ok? He told me to take a walk, and I did."

Ziva, face impassive, just looked at him.

He tried out a weak smile and a joke: "Just call me Saint Timothy. Pretty sure there is one of those."

Her face remained stony for a moment, and then she snorted. "You are no saint, Timothy. You forget, I have spoken to Abby."

"I - what?"

"On the other hand, you are closer to sainthood than Tony. And you are less likely to be lying to me to save yourself. So very well. You did not know. You swear this to me?"

"I swear." Crisis averted, McGee belatedly took the time to process the last few seconds of their conversation, and he didn't like what he had heard. Swallowing, he signaled the waitress, deciding that he needed a drink after all. "So, uh...what was it Abby told you?"

Ziva just smiled and took another sip of her drink.


	15. Would it be worth it?

Tony dropped into his chair back at the table, still looking over his shoulder for either an angry bathroom customer or an angry partner to descend on him.

"What?" Jeanne asked, following his gaze over his shoulder and looking concerned. "What are you looking at?"

He shook his head and turned back to her. "Nothing," he replied with a fat smile, and reached for his beer.

"You were in there a long time," she commented casually, picking up her bottle to mirror him. "Anything wrong?"

Had she seen Ziva emerge before him? "Nope," he lied, then took a long, slow sip of his beer as seconds of silence ticked by.

Jeanne sighed. "You're a bad liar, Tony. At least about little things like this." She smiled. "I saw you both come out of there." When Tony opened his mouth, she held up a hand to stop him. "Let's try an experiment, ok? You tell me the truth, and I'll reply."

Giving up the denials, he let out a defeated breath. "She followed me in there, ok? Picked the lock. I didn't even know she saw me go in."

"There, see? That wasn't so hard," Jeanne said, patting his hand comfortingly. "Now let's try it again. Why did she follow you into the bathroom?"

"Honestly?" he said, reflecting on their conversation. "I don't know. She said she had to pee."

Jeanne snickered. "Uh-huh."

"Yeah, that's what I said. But she didn't tell me any other reason, Jeanne, seriously." The more he thought about it, the more he found himself truly unsure of what her objective had been. Uncomfortable with, for once, not knowing what was going on in the heads of either woman tonight, he took another drink. "Maybe she really just had to go," he finally ventured weakly, setting the bottle back down on the table.

"Maybe I should talk to her, Tony," she said suddenly, tightening her hand around his where they both lay on the table. "I mean, explain that there isn't anything between -"

"_Hell _no!"

Jeanne stopped short and looked at him with raised eyebrows that demanded an explanation.

"Just...no."

"Look, Tony, I showed up at your door and, as far as I can tell, screwed your whole life up. That's not what I wanted to do here, ok? I wanted to come back, feel you -"

"Up?" he supplied hopefully.

"_Out_," Jeanne finished, giving him a repressive look. "I told myself I would give us another chance to consider each other, and then whatever happened, I could come away knowing we had given it a fair chance. And we've done that. And it's clear that you're just..." She shook her head. "Not there any longer. And that's ok. It's been a long time."

"Jeanne -" he began, lacing his fingers through hers.

She shook her head again, stopping him, and pulled her hand away. "Your heart's not in it, Tony." Sighing, she drew back in her seat. "You should talk to her."

"Yeah, well, that didn't work so well five minutes ago." He pictured their conversation and laughed at what he could only imagine would happen the next time he tried to talk to her. "Trust me, anything between me and her would end up with one of us killing the other. And the odds are about 90 percent that I'd be the dead one."

She cocked her head to the side and met his eyes. "Would it be worth it?"

Tony's laugh died on his lips, and he lowered his head, caught by her words. "Probably."

Her point made, Jeanne gave him a tiny, sad smile and stood up. "Call me sometime and let me know how things work out, ok?"

"Wha- Jeanne!" He grabbed for her retreating hand on the table, but she was too fast for him.

Still smiling, she leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his cheek. "Good luck, Tony," she whispered.

And she was gone.


	16. Glass shards

Ziva settled back in her chair, idly toying with the straw in her drink. McGee, across from her, was focused keenly on his first beer of the night, and was, for the moment, no longer watching her like he believed she was a powder keg. She was taking advantage of that fact to steal a look over her shoulder at the couple she'd been trying to ignore all night. As she watched, Jeanne reached over and took Tony's hand, leaning toward him and whispering something Ziva couldn't lip-read.

Unable to stand the intimacy she was witnessing, she pulled her eyes away and turned back to her drink. She took a too-large sip of rum and mint, tried to swallow it anyway, and promptly choked, startling McGee into looking at her. "You ok?" he asked with concern.

She coughed, trying to get the alcohol out of her airway, and managed to croak out a "fine" to him.

Looking unconvinced, he nodded and passed her a napkin. "Careful with those things, huh? I don't want to have to roll you ho-" He broke off there, blinking at something behind her. "Huh."

Ziva coughed again into the napkin and turned to try to see what had caught his attention, but saw nothing particularly surprising in the rest of the bar - no fights, no scantily-clad women. "What?"

"Uh..." He returned his attention to her, but only momentarily; his eyes soon flicked back to where they had been. "She's, uh...leaving."

"What?" Ziva whipped back around just in time to see the back of Jeanne's coat disappear through the bar's front door. They waited in suspense, both expecting to see Tony trail her out of the building, but there was no more movement once the door shut behind Jeanne. Unable to help herself, Ziva turned to look at where Tony and Jeanne had been sitting. Now there was only Tony, who was staring at the door with nearly as much consternation as she and McGee were.

McGee pursed his lips and furrowed his brows in the puzzled-McGee look she knew so well, and picked his beer up again. "Wonder if he said something wrong. I mean, he is Tony, after all."

Her eyes still on Tony, Ziva shook her head. "He doesn't look guilty enough for that." There was silence between them for a moment as they both tried to come up with a plausible hypothesis, and then Ziva turned back to McGee, picked up her drink, and stood up. "I will find out."

"You'll what? Um, Ziva," he tried, reaching out to stop her, "that may not be such a good idea. I mean, for all we know she's coming back in a minute and just needed something out of her car!"

"No," she said slowly, thoughtfully. "She is not coming back. If she were, he would not look so..." She groped for the right word, and finally came up with, "- empty."

Distracted by trying to see in Tony's face what Ziva did, McGee inadvertently loosened his grip on her wrist, and Ziva took advantage of the lapse to pull away. "Wait!" he blurted in a last-ditch attempt to stop her.

She paused and looked back at him, taking in the concern on his face. "I will be fine, McGee. As will he. I promise, no fistfights." She smiled brightly until he buckled under the pressure and nodded at her. "Probably," she added under her breath as she started across the room.

* * *

Tony stared into his beer, wondering how he was going to extricate himself from this situation without the humiliation of two of his coworkers seeing him walk out alone. So far, the best ideas he'd come up with were to either try to sneak out a bathroom window, or get so falling-down drunk that he wouldn't _care _that they were watching. Or he could wait them out, he supposed, but they had looked pretty damn comfortable the last time he checked. He snuck a glance over at their table again, expecting to see their heads together as they spoke. Instead, he saw McGee sitting alone with a beer, in a rather close imitation of Tony himself. Had Ziva gone to the bathroom again so soon? He smiled bitterly. He should get up and go give her a taste of her own medicine - break in on her as she peed.

"Something is funny?"

Tony started at the voice, and as he jerked his head up to look at its owner, Ziva slid into the chair that Jeanne had been occupying until a few moments ago. Tony stared at her for a second, and then just shook his head. "Nope. Nothing funny here. What are you doing?"

She twirled the straw in her drink, then took a sip. "Drinking with a friend."

Tony looked back over to where McGee was. "Looks like you're not doing a great job of it, considering he's sitting alone."

"I was not referring to him."

His face hardened. "Yeah, well, I don't recall inviting you to this party."

"It doesn't look like much of a party," she replied philosophically. "They generally are not, with only one person in attendance."

"There's not..." He looked over at the door Jeanne had exited from, then back at Ziva. Dredging up his most innocent, boyish smile, he chuckled. "I mean, uh, you thought she left? Haha." He cleared his throat. "She just, uh..." A pause. "We're going to, you know, meet up later." And he took a large sip of his beer.

She knew him too well to fall for anything he tried to pass off using that smile, but for the moment, she let it go. "Ohhh," she breathed with a credulous nod. "How nice for you."

Tony's eyes met hers, then darted away. He took another sip of beer.

Ziva continued to watch him.

He drained his beer.

When he set the bottle back on the table, she smiled and crossed her arms. "So. It was a lovers' quarrel, then?"

"No." He picked up the bottle again and raised it to his lips, not realizing until it was there that he had just emptied it. Frowning, he lowered it back to the table.

She raised her eyebrows. "For not having been in a quarrel, you look suspiciously unhappy."

"It wasn't a..." He burped and pushed his empty bottle to the edge of the table. "It wasn't a 'quarrel'. And who uses the word 'quarrel,' anyway?"

"I do. And if it wasn't a qua- an _argument_," she corrected herself, "then why do you look as you do?"

"And how's that?"

She drank the remainder of her mojito while she tried to come up with a good way to phrase it, then pushed her empty glass over next to his empty bottle. "Like you can think of nothing more attractive right now than another bottle of beer."

"Hey, now." He lounged back in his chair, assuming a position of deliberate insolence. "Maybe I just want to get loosened up before the rest of my...date."

Ziva's hands stilled under the table. "Interesting," she managed coolly after a second, "how it has suddenly become a date."

"Yeah, I thought so."

That response told her nothing, and she fought a childish urge to kick his shin under the table. She couldn't quite stifle the equally-childish rejoinder that came to her lips: "If you get any 'looser,' you will be of no use to your _date_ later tonight."

"You think?" He crossed his arms and smiled. "I'm pretty sure you're wrong, because Jeanne could tell you stories about -"

The legs of Ziva's chair screeched against the floor as she shoved it back. She was on her feet and glaring at him before Tony could get out another word. "Well, then," she hissed, "I hope you enjoy yourselves." She stepped back from the table and pushed the chair back in with enough force to rock the table up onto two legs. The glass and the bottle teetered unsteadily on its edge for a second, then toppled to the floor together and shattered. Tony jumped at the sound and opened his mouth, but Ziva was already halfway across the bar. As he watched, she stalked back to her table, snatched up her coat without a word to McGee, and headed for the front door.

Tony looked down at the ground, where clear glass shards lay mixed with dark ones, and sighed.


	17. McObvious

Tony made a stop at the bar to get himself another beer, rationalizing that he deserved it at this point, and strolled over to where McGee was sitting, still staring open-mouthed at the door. "You're bad luck for a guy, you know that?" he asked, sitting down across from the other man.

McGee blinked and slowly swiveled his head to look at him. "I wouldn't go blaming me for this one, Tony. You're the one who managed to run off not one, but two of them tonight."

Tony gave him a snide look and tipped up his beer for a drink. "Very funny."

"That's not the adjective I would have used to describe it, but if you say so..." He shrugged one shoulder and lifted his beer in a sarcastic toast to Tony.

Scowling, Tony slumped down in his seat and twisted his beer bottle around in his hands. "Was it something I said, Probie?"

"Don't know, Tony. What'd you say?"

"Nothing!"

"Then probably not, no." McGee smiled slightly, finding himself sympathetic in spite of knowing that this was one of the best mocking opportunities he'd ever get. God knew he'd had enough dates that didn't end well to know a bit of what Tony was experiencing. "Although it might have been the fact that you didn't say anything, then. You know, girls like conversation."

Tony snorted. "Like I take advice about women from you."

McGee shrugged again. Clearly Tony wasn't interested in an analysis, no matter how teasing, of his evening.

Tony used one fingernail to loosen his beer's label and carefully tore off a continuous strip that circled the bottle. He dropped the curled paper on the table, wiped his hand on his pants, and picked the beer back up but stopped short of bringing it to his lips. "I mean seriously," he said, putting it back down. "I didn't say anything to her! I just agreed with what she said. Or disagreed. Whichever it was."

"Who? Jeanne, or Ziva?"

That question seemed to take Tony by surprise. "Ziva," he said as if it should have been obvious. "It's not my fault if she doesn't believe me when I tell her it's not a date. And if she keeps throwing it in my face that she doesn't believe me, of _course_ I'm eventually just going to agree with it to shut her up."

"Aha." McGee picked up the discarded bit of label Tony had dropped and carefully began folding it into an even-cornered rectangle. "Doing something just to shut Ziva up," he opined without looking up from his work, "never ends well."

"No kidding, McObvious."

"So then why'd you do it?"

That put him at a loss, and Tony opened and then closed his mouth twice before coming up with a suitable reply, which was to shrug his shoulders and mutter, "She pushed me."

"Pretty sure you guys have been engaged in one big pushing match for the past, oh, week." McGee reached into Ziva's forgotten platter of nachos and helped himself to a chip covered with congealed cheese. He guessed he would be paying for it, anyway, so he might as well finish it. "Does this mean she won?"

"What?" Tony, only now noticing there was food to be had, snatched up a handful of chips and stuffed them into his mouth. "Hell no. The woman does not _exist _who can best Tony DiNozzo." The statement, which had sounded all sorts of noble in his head, came out in a rush of mumbles and sprayed tortilla crumbs in reality.

McGee winced and ducked to the side just in time to avoid taking a clump of crumbs to the face. "Aw," he groaned, wiping off what had hit his sleeve, "c'mon, Tony, that's gross!"

"Sorry." Tony chewed and swallowed, then tried again. "She did _not _win this one, Probie, I promise you that."

"Yeah?" McGee asked with raised eyebrows. "Because from where I sit, she's the one who got to make an awesome exit, and you're sitting here eating cold nachos."

Tony looked at the nachos, then back up at McGee and, moving too quickly for McGee to stop him, reached across the table to pluck the handkerchief out of the other man's breast pocket. He wiped a smear of cheese off his pinky with it and stood up. "You just haven't seen the second _act_, Probie," he said in his best Jack Nicholson voice, dropped the hankie back on the table, and headed for the door.

McGee watched him go, then looked back down at the nachos. "Ok, I'll give him that one," he allowed, reaching for another chip. "That was a pretty good exit too."

* * *

**A/N: The site has been having major uploading issues, so I'm trying a workaround to get this up. Also, the site ate notifications for part of the week - to avoid missing a new chapter in the future, you can follow me on twitter, where my username is FluffyFanFic. I will always link to new chapters there.  
**


	18. Lime juice

"Open up, Ziva!" Tony raised his fist to start pounding on the door again. He'd knocked for two minutes straight before giving himself and the neighbors a thirty-second break, but he wasn't going to give in now and have her know he'd walked away just because she wasn't responding. "I know you're in there! I'm gonna keep knocking here until -"

"Tony?"

He froze mid-knock and turned to see Ziva approaching from the stairwell, her keys in one hand and a brown paper grocery bag in the other. The only thing he could think of to do was drop his hand away from the door, so he did that and offered her a weak smile.

"How long have you been banging on my door?" she demanded, looking around to make sure no neighbors were watching their conversation. "Did the fact that I did not _answer_ not give you a clue?"

"No! I figured you were just, you know..." He shrugged and turned his palms up. "Being mad."

"Oh, I _am _mad," she agreed readily, taking a step toward him and enjoying the fact that he took a corresponding step back. "However, I am also not inside my apartment. Your investigatory skills are somewhat lacking tonight, it would seem."

Tony frowned. "There's nothing wrong with my -"

Ignoring him, Ziva began to sort one-handedly through her keys for the one to the main lock on her front door. "As are your romantic skills," she went on as she began working on the first lock, "if the date you were so eager to brag about has ended again so soon."

"Yeah, um, about that."

Ziva paused with the key turned halfway in the lock and looked over her shoulder with an expression that told him she couldn't wait to hear what would come out of his mouth next.

"When I said it was a 'date' - I mean, the time I said it was, not the time I said it wasn't - I mean, the times I said it wasn't - what I _meant _-"

"Inside," Ziva interrupted, opening the apartment door. She walked in without waiting for him, but was gratified to see the he followed obediently a second later. She set her keys down on the kitchen counter, unbuttoned her coat, and turned back to him. "Continue," she ordered, shrugging out of the coat and slinging it over the back of a chair.

"Uh." He absently mirrored her movements, throwing his coat over hers. "So, uh, what I was saying was, um..."

"_Tonight_, Tony. Do you not have a date to be getting to?"

"No."

That got her attention, and Ziva looked up from groceries she had begun to sort through, one hand still on the loaf of bread she had just pulled out of the bag. "I beg your pardon?"

He scratched the back of his head and snapped defensively, "You knew I was lying about it being a date!"

"Did I?" She flipped open the breadbox on the corner of the counter and dropped the bread into it, then turned back to the grocery bag and pulled out two limes. "You seemed very sure of it when you were so excitedly telling me about it."

"What're the limes for?" He wasn't changing the subject; he was just...sidestepping it. "You continuing the party?"

She looked down at them and shrugged. "Perhaps. But as I told you earlier, parties with only one person tend to not be very diverting."

"Yeah, well..." Her words sounded like an invitation, but could just as easily be a trap. He decided to step into it anyway. "I could, you know, hang around. Make it a two person party."

Putting one lime down on the counter, she began rolling it between her palm and the hard surface to loosen the juice inside. "I do not share my party guests with other...hosts, Tony. If you are interested in attending my 'party,' then I will need to know that you are not...previously engaged."

"Oh, come on!" Exasperated by her continued coyness, he threw up a hand and half-turned away from her in disgust. "I already told you it wasn't a date!"

She started to slam her hand down on the counter and only barely managed to stop herself before she squashed the lime. "Yes, Tony, you did! Now I want you to tell me why you said that it _was_. And what happened. And why you have appeared at my door tonight after doing your very best to run me off an hour ago!"

He stared at her for a second, surprised by her phrasing. It hadn't occurred to him that she would think his defensive posturing was an attack on her. "I didn't try to run you off."

"You told me you were meeting her again later!" she accused, rounding on him. The lime rolled off the counter, forgotten, and bounced once on the tile floor before coming to rest. "Do not tell me you thought hearing that would make me want to _stay_!"

"No, but I thought maybe it would make you stop pushing my buttons!"

Ziva gave him an indignant look. "Buttons? I did not touch you!"

His anger interrupted by the mental reboot Ziva's idiomatic misunderstandings always caused, Tony closed his eyes and hid an untimely smile. "Turn of phrase, Ziva. It means you were saying things you knew would annoy me."

"And you were not doing the same to me?" she shot back. "You told me you were 'loosening up' for Jeanne!"

"I was lying!" he roared, tired of going in circles.

Eyes wide and angry, Ziva stepped close enough to put herself nose-to-nose with him. "I know!" she yelled into his face.

He stared her down. She didn't back off. "Then why are you yelling at me?" he shouted back.

"Why shouldn't I?" she retorted at full-volume and, having run out of words in her attempt to describe the situation, she caught him by surprise with a sweep of her ankle behind his knee.

Before Tony knew what was happening, he was flat on his back on her kitchen floor and she was kneeling astride him with her hands on his chest. "What was that for?" he managed to choke out as his lungs re-inflated.

She leaned down, putting them nose-to-nose again. "For lying to me!"

Tony considered his situation for a moment, then did the only thing that seemed appropriate: throwing his hands out to his sides in submission, he flattened his palms on the ground and looked up at her. "Ok," he said, and would have shrugged if she didn't have his shoulders pinned to the ground. "Punish me, mistress."

"What..." Confused, Ziva pulled back to study him, only belatedly noticing the smile on his face. "You...!" She aimed a half-hearted slap at the side of his head, which Tony blocked with ease. "What do I look like, a a domi-matrix?"

"Dominatrix," he corrected. "And yeah, kinda." He lifted his head as much off the ground as he could to survey the scene she presented. "I mean," he said hoarsely, the position having forced most of the air back out of his lungs, "I could be wrong, but it probably has something to do with the fact that you just threw me flat on my back. That's very dominatrix-y." He frowned thoughtfully. "Could use some black leather, though."

Laughing, Ziva sat back on her heels and picked her hands up off his chest. "Never on a first date."

Tony got his elbows under him enough to prop his upper body slightly up. "What's that?" he asked, cocking an ear comically as he leaned toward her. "Did I just hear you call this a date?"

"Hah." She pushed him back down with one hand. "As I have said, I do not date men who will be leaving me to go to a date with another woman." Tony opened his mouth to protest that characterization, but she moved her hand up from his chest to his mouth, covering it. "Tell me the truth, Tony," she said softly, face suddenly serious. "Please." No longer meeting his eyes, she sat back, freeing his hands and upper body, folded her hands in front of her, and waited.

He planted one hand on the floor and managed to lever himself up almost to a sitting position. "You want to know what she talked about tonight?" he grumbled, struggling to gain another inch forward on his shaking arm as she stubbornly refused to shift her weight. "She said that it was obvious where my attention was focused, and it wasn't on her."

That was cryptic enough for Ziva to need a moment to parse it, and as she blinked at him, his arm gave out and he made a desperate grab for her waist with his other hand, intending to hold onto her to keep himself up. Her distraction slowed her reflexes, however, and instead of supporting his weight, she toppled over with him. They landed in a jumble, his face pressed into her abdomen and hers into the linoleum above his head.

"She even offered to talk to you for me," Tony mumbled into her shirt.

Ziva spat out a mouthful of floor grit and pushed herself up enough to look down through her arms at him. "I beg your pardon?"

He shrugged, as if to say _I know, right?_ "And she wished me good luck."

That was what she had thought he said. She rolled off him, ending up on her knees beside his head, and stared down at him. "Jeanne Benoit offered to speak to me for you, and wished you good luck with me?" she asked incredulously.

He sat up, putting his back against a cabinet, and draped his arms over his knees. "Yeah."

"I...see." She didn't see, in fact. She couldn't quite get her brain around why the other woman would have said such things.

"And then she told me to call her some time and let her know how things go with you. So..." He spread his arms wide in an inviting gesture, inadvertently whacking the back of one hand into a cabinet door. "Ouch. Uh, I'm all yours," he said, then ruined the effect by putting his sore hand to his mouth. "No other dates lined up," he mumbled around his fingers.

"Until?" she prompted, raising her eyebrows coolly.

"That," he replied slowly, lowering his hand again, "would depend on you."

The hard look on her face softened slightly. She leaned forward, hands on her knees, and studied his face. "Oh?"

"Yeah." He reached up to touch her face. When she jerked away reflexively, he pulled his hand back and turned it so she could see the darkened tips of his fingers. "You had a smear of...stuff," he offered with a conciliatory smile. "When was the last time you cleaned this floor?"

Distracted, Ziva blinked and looked down at the tile. "I do not know. Perhaps a week ago? It does seem particularly dusty, now that you mention - oof!" She went down without time to fight as Tony knocked her hands off her knees, taking away her support and launching her face-first into his chest, but before he could get a good hold on her, she had twisted around, put her back to him, jabbed an elbow into his stomach, and snatched one of his hands.

He grimaced, then looked at down at where she now had his arm captive across her chest. "Gonna break it?" he asked with only mild interest. If she was truly enraged, she wouldn't dare touch him for fear of doing him real injury. An elbow in the stomach was, considering Ziva, a good sign.

She stroked her fingers over his hand thoughtfully and leaned forward, testing how much slack he would give her in her movement. "Probably not." She only got him forward an inch before he purposely became a dead weight, and Ziva smiled to herself. "Of course, I could throw my head back and break your nose."

Tony winced and craned his neck away from her. After the number of nosebleeds he'd suffered in the course of his job, his nose was the one place he did _not _want her hitting him. Well, one of two places. "You could," he agreed with deliberate casualness. "But it wouldn't be my first choice."

"No?" She shrugged and patted his hand. "In that case, I suggest you promise to curtail your dating for the foreseeable future."

"Huh?" Not following her conversational leap, he leaned over her shoulder to see her face, hoping it would give something away.

She helpfully tipped her head back until it was resting against his shoulder and he had a clear view. Then she smiled slyly. "I broke the nose of the last man who cheated on me."

Tony gaped wordlessly at her.

"Although," she added, looking reflective, "I believe my father may have eventually had him killed, also."

"I -"

"Of course, you will not have to deal with my father," she cut him off. "But you will have to deal with _me_." And before he could respond to that, she shot to her feet, dragging him with her, and hauled a very surprised Tony over her shoulder in a deliberately-gentle judo throw.

He landed with a thump on his back in front of her and groaned loudly. "Ziva..."

She squatted back down to look at him. "Do we have an agreement?"

"Yeah," he grunted painfully. "But Ziva -"

"Yes?"

Groaning again, Tony reached under his hip and pulled out the flattened remains of a lime. "You're really going to have to clean this floor now."

She stared at the lime juice dripping off his hand for a second, then burst out laughing. "I suppose I am," she allowed, relieving him of the mess and straightening up to drop it into the sink. "It can wait, however. I would -"

He got her for the second time in one night, throwing his arms around her knees and dragging her back down to the floor. This time, she landed on top of him. Laughing, he locked one arm around her back, holding her down, and used the other to force her head down for a hungry kiss.

* * *

An hour later, a loud banging from the other side of her bedroom wall made them both look up. "My neighbor," Ziva explained breathlessly.

Tony looked from the wall to her with new understanding. "When you told me you have trouble with your neighbors because you're a screamer..."

Ignoring the continuing thuds from the wall, she gave him a coy look and kissed his neck. "They will just have to get used to it," she mumbled, flipping their bodies to put him on his back.

Tony let out a breath that was a cross between a laugh and a gasp and forgot about the neighbors.

**Fin**


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